Recent liquid laundry detergent consumer preferences towards smaller more concentrated product forms have resulted in the liquid detergent formulators handling a whole series of different constraints. In addition, not only do consumers want smaller compacted liquid laundry detergent products but the consumers also want these compacted products to have the same performance as traditional uncompacted liquid laundry detergents; this is an extremely difficult consumer need to meet.
Compacted liquid laundry detergent products have less space to incorporate detergent ingredients; this places great constraint on the detergent formulator, especially for restricting the levels of the bulk detergent ingredients like surfactants, builders and solvents that take up much of the formulation space. For the detergent ingredients that are incorporated into these compacted liquid laundry detergent products, the detergent formulator must greatly improve the efficiency of these detergent ingredients, and of the compacted liquid laundry detergent composition as a whole.
As well as ensures such compacted liquid laundry detergents have good cleaning performance, the detergent formulator must also ensure that such products have good product storage stability profile, and desirable rheological properties to ensure that the product can be handled and dosed easily by the consumer.
An additional problem associated to compacted detergents is the manufacture process. The reduction of ingredients, such as solvents can give rise to undesired phase formation in the base composition, such as surfactant middle phases that are difficult to process.
Sometimes, it is desirable to make a base detergent composition which can be diluted to make finished detergent compositions rather than making different finished products from the beginning. From a process efficiency view point it would be beneficial to have a common base composition that can be later on differentiated to give rise to different products. Very often this is not possible because the post-addition of solvent or late differentiation additives to the base composition would alter the rheology of the composition making it unmanageable.
The aim of the present invention is to overcome the above described drawbacks.